Academia or industry? The effect of long-term performance feedback on collaborative innovation partner selection

In this study, we enrich the framework of long-term performance feedback by incorporating different feedback states and aspirational referents, as well as integrating it into the research model of collaborative innovation partner selection. By categorising partner into academia and industry, we argue that firms with long-term historical underperformance (overperformance) are more likely to choose industry (academia) partners than academia (industry) ones. However, firm's partner selection preference demonstrates an opposite tendency when peers are taken as the aspirational referent. Our hypotheses received general support by testing the sample of 114 public biopharmaceutical companies between 2008 and 2020 in China.